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The 110 Million Dollar Button
Reservoir Hill writes "The 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button on Google's search page may cost the company up to $110 million in lost ad revenue every year according to a report on American Public Media's Marketplace. Tom Chavez says that since the company makes money selling ads on its search results page, the 1% of users who use the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button never see Google's ads - the button automatically directs them to their first search result. So why does Google keep the button? Marisa Mayer, Google's vice president responsible for everything on the search page, says that 'it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money' and the 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' button reminds you that 'people here have personality.' Web usability expert Jacob Nielsen says the whimsy serves another business purpose: 'Oh we're just two kind of grad students hanging out and having a beer and having a grand old time,' not you know, 'We are 16,000 people working on undermining your privacy.'"
Has anyone here ever used the "I'm feeling lucky" button. I think I did once in 1999. Usually it's the second or third result that's the most relevant.
Never have, but if you type a phrase into the address bar in Firefox it does the same thing.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I think I use it almost all the time recently - in recent firefox versions I just type what I want in the address bar and it seems to get me where I want, or for more complex things I end up with a more usual search page. For example entering "slashdot wiki" in the address bar takes me to the wikipedia entry about slashdot but "110 million slashdot" gives me a normal, as if using the search bar result with this discussion as top link. Best feature ever.
The calculation is probably pretty simple: 1% of people click that button results in 1% of 10 billion US$ revenue. This assumes only that almost all the 10 billion revenue is made with search ads (which is not true), but otherwise is a fair assumption. -Bernd
They seem to handle it pretty well in Google Suggest:
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Hmmmm....you mean like StumbleUpon?
One can also type "wp slashdot" in the address bar to preform a wikipedia search. This is default behaviour for firefox.
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Undermining my privacy? The only information Google is able to get abut me is what I do online -- and not much of that. I wipe cookies once in a while, and that's the only reliable way they have to track me on other sites. Take off the tinfoil hat, Nielsen.
Of course, to throw them off the scent, I randomly view Oprah's website, NASCAR videos, and horse porn once in a while.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
wp... or virtually anything you want. You just have to get to any search form, right click on its input box and select "Add search keyword" (I use Spanish FF, YMMV). Then it asks you for a name, a keyword, and the folder to save the "bookmark". I have wpe for Spanish Wikipedia, urban for urbandictionary, imdb for... imdb, and so on.
My 0.02 cents
Not here it's not (Windows XP, Firefox 2.0.0.9, both installed fresh about 2 weeks ago). It just goes to Google search for 'wp slashdot'.
I can believe that you view Oprah's site and NASCAR videos randomly, but no one views horse porn "randomly". :D
In Firefox 2, when you type something which isn't recognizably a URI into the location bar, it doesn't use "I'm Feeling Lucky", it uses a subtly different Google search mode called "Browse by Name".
It's easy enough to fix: just go to about:config and change the keyword.URL property from its default value,
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
to something like
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&btnI=&q=
which should restore the "I'm Feeling Lucky" functionality and get you back to normal.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
There are "open redirectors" on many major sites, including Google, AOL, eBay, and Microsoft Live. (Yahoo plugged their hole by giving their open redirector its own, easily blockable, domain.) We mentioned this on Slashdot a few days ago, and someone immediately followed up by using the Google exploit to get through Slashdot's filters.
These open redirectors are regularly exploited by phishing scams. People report them to PhishTank, and over at SiteTruth, we tie them back to the domain responsible and fix blame. PhishTank is too nice about this. They just blacklist the phishing URL. That stopped working a few months back, when phishers started generating random URLs and subdomains for each e-mail. We down-rate the whole base domain.
It's time to take a hard line on this. The Internet used to tolerate open mail relays, which were a nice feature until spammers started exploiting them. Now they're routinely blocked. Open redirectors now need similar treatment.
Beyond simple URL redirectors are exploits of JavaScript redirectors. Efforts are underway to detect and block those.